The Plague Ship
by RoseFrederick
Summary: If you can't believe the news, what can you believe?  Simon's precipitous decision to depart from Serenity in Beaumonde has an entirely different outcome.  AU for post series/during the movie.
1. Introduction

**The Plague Ship**

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><p>Disclaimer: I am not Joss Whedon or anyone else with ownership or bragging rights to the Firefly 'Verse, alas. The following contains Character Death. What can I say, perhaps Joss' need to kill people is contagious?<p>

Author's Note: I had an idea for a short fic and I wrote it. After, I didn't much like it, so I wrote it in an entirely different way. Much later, I still think it could be done better, but both versions are okay. So. This is less a fic with two chapters and more two slightly different fics on a theme.

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><p>.<p>

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><p>All across the 'Verse, all the news broadcasts on all the channels were in agreement. It was a disease, they said, somehow spreading uncontrolled and unpredictable between random planets and leaving a swath of the gruesomely dead in its wake.<p>

The randomness of the outbreaks was just as disturbing as the deadly results in every case. People were rightfully afraid. Yet as terrible as the content of the news broadcasts were, the truth was so much worse in its own way.


	2. Version I

**VERSION I:**

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><p>It was yet another undistinguished example of the hundreds of seedy little bars that intermittently dotted the Rim planets anywhere there were sufficient people to establish a town. What it lacked for in cleanliness, ambiance, selection, and recently-washed clientele it didn't really make up for in any other way. Still, it was anonymous and served alcohol and that was all that was necessary right now. The video screens placed infrequently around the walls were just a useful bonus. Too much work done in the Core lately made the dinginess of the little place chafe somewhat, but adaptability was key in this line of work. So was information, and that's why the originator of these thoughts was watching the latest news with more than passing interest as it flashed across the screens.<p>

The latest was yet another bulletin about an ominous sickness that had been intermittently making its way around the 'Verse. The first cases had broken out at the spaceport several months back in Beaumonde and hadn't even been announced to the public until further outbreak incidents had occurred. Sure the Alliance had gone in and quarantined the place and all that, but they had kept it from the public until it was obvious that the thing was spreading.

There had followed numerous cases the Alliance had started to announce to the news, with travel warnings and requests for the public to report anyone suspicious who may have recently been in those areas. There hadn't seemed to be much of a pattern, what with outbreaks occurring everywhere from backwoods settlements on Jiangyin to that mining camp on Haven. Even that newly-established Companion House out on ... Bena, wasn't it? was hit. There seemed to be no particular rhyme or reason to the outbreaks that would occur so suddenly and virulently that everyone in the immediate area would die all together - with no time to even attempt to flee, and yet people not in the immediate area were completely unaffected. Some of the victims had been lone individuals and some had been entire families, even a few entire communities were suddenly just dead. The best medical scientists working for the Alliance said that it was some kind of normally harmless vector organism which erupted violently when it came into contact with some as-yet unknown new microbial trigger. Victims suffered from seizures and extensive hemorrhaging and reportedly died within hours – or even minutes - of exposure to the secondary reactive factor.

The public at large had grown increasingly terrified with the unstoppable and unpredictable menace. Even those who normally looked down on the Alliance were taking the newscasts seriously and reporting in to their local law enforcement if they had been in contact with any of the known outbreaks. This latest bulletin was just slightly different though. This one proclaimed that they'd finally located the originating source of the second factor as a new mutation of a common microbe with a rapid deterioration rate. It had apparently been carried back and forth all across the verse by an itinerant cargo ship. The crew from that ship had recently finally been found – all dead of the same plague that they'd been unknowingly spreading across various sundry corners of the 'Verse. The smiling newscaster was quick to reassure that officials felt it was unlikely that more than a few isolated cases would emerge past this point since the origination point of the sickness had finally been found.

The report ended with the public being urged to contact their local law outpost immediately if they'd had any contact with the vessel _Serenity_ and its crew within the last year. At the bar, the woman who had been watching turned away absorbed in her own thoughts. She, who had gone by so many names but never her own, was surprised to find herself slightly disappointed. She had dearly wanted to pay that bastard Reynolds back for getting the drop on her – twice! To find out her not-so-dear husband had gone and gotten himself all dead before she could do so was - just like him, really.

She wasn't stupid enough to turn herself in, though. The whole thing had a bad smell to it to begin with, but even beyond that she'd heard the rumors of advanced sonic weapons elite agents of the Alliance used to get rid of enemies. She had no idea what in the worlds a nobody like him could have managed to wander into to deserve to be part of such a massacre, but she wasn't going to pull any suspicion on herself trying to find out. She wasn't _that_ curious, and she especially didn't like that it sounded like they were still looking to tie up any lose ends that might have come into contact with his little band of misfits.

It wasn't the reason that she'd moved out to the Rim, but it was a sufficiently good reason to stay out to the edges for a good while. With that decision made, there wasn't much point in sticking around this hole any longer. It was doubtful anybody here had anything worth stealing. As she got up and left the bar to suss out her next mark, she never noticed the two men following her, or the strange blue gloves they were wearing until it was far too late.


	3. Version II

**VERSION II:**

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><p><em>Seems I remember a talk about you giving orders on my boat. <em>

_Well sleep easy 'cause we're off your boat. Just as soon as River gets her share of the "bounty"._

- dialog excerpt from _Serenity_.

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><p>Even his little sister having a fit about the color of the air in the spaceport didn't change the doctor's mind. He simply decided to stay with her on the ship and wait for the latest attempt at medication to kick in before leaving and attempting to find another berth. After the crew returned without incident from their negotiations, and his sister was sufficiently sedated, Simon and River Tam left <em>Serenity <em>without any further confrontations. No one on the crew ever heard from (or about) either of them again.

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><p>The first reports about it to make the news were mostly unconcerned, if slightly baffled. While medical technology had advanced quite a bit in the years since humanity had gone out into the stars, access to most of it was still limited to facilities in the core planets. So an outbreak of disease on some Rimward backwater named Beaumonde didn't concern anyone but the residents of Beaumonde. At least, not at first.<p>

In general, quarantine lockdowns in such cases kept diseases from spreading too far from their point of origin, despite the quantity of travel and lack of sufficient regulation upon it throughout the Verse. Despite the fact that there were whispers about the corpses that had been taken from the bars around the spaceport – covered in blood oozing from all of their orifices and a rictus of horror on every last dead face – no one was worried until the second report.

By the time the official news outlets were telling the public about a third breakout of the strange and still purportedly unexplained disease in some outer Rim mining colony, everyone who didn't live in the Core was starting to feel somewhat nervous. The fact that the fourth report came in almost immediately on the tail of the third and was from a hub like Persephone only made things that much worse. Even if the victims were just a bunch of lowlife thugs with a leader who called himself after some kind of rodent.

Still, it was a quiet sort of panic. Even those who didn't understand much of anything about disease pathology knew that it was fairly odd that whatever it was just seemed to be striking isolated, random locations but not spreading outward from them at all. While the number of cases continued to increase, it wasn't any kind of predictable increasing progression, either. Those with a more concrete understanding of the mechanics of disease doubted that it actually was a disease. However, none of them ever made it on the news to say so.

A few weeks in, just after the most recent report on latest place hit - that Companion training house so recently established outside the Core, an alert was issued about the possible origin and vector behind the outbreaks. Apparently they had retraced the events in Beaumonde through the security footage in establishments with cameras near the docks enough to have determined that case zero was one of two passengers dropped off there by a cargo ship. Furthermore, the same ship had been known to frequent at least one of the later sites of outbreak on a regular basis. Officials were therefore seeking knowledge of the whereabouts, past and present, of a firefly class transport named _Serenity_. Although reports had it that there were no survivors present at any of the incidents known to the public, it was speculated that those on the ship might have survived the initial outbreak and become healthy-seeming carriers with a possibly useful immunity.

After that bulletin, the outbreaks that continued to occur were reported interspersed amongst supposed sightings of said ship. Of course, with the way that sort of thing always worked, most of them were probably entirely made up by overexcited members of the public. At least there was never an official announcement made about the crew turning themselves in or the ship being tracked down before the outbreaks stopped happening just as suddenly and mysteriously as they had originally begun.

Of course, just because something is not reported upon in the media does not mean that it has not happened. Not any more than the official reported explanation for a rash of deaths being a disease makes it true.

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><p>"Dead."<p>

"So is this one." The man who had spoken first moved over to the bridge console and spent a few minutes with his blue-gloved hands typing furiously away. He sat back and looked to his companion.

"Everything set?"

"Twenty minutes from now the ship crashes on a barren stretch of Whitefall generally used as a junkyard. Shouldn't be enough left for anyone to know it's connected to the _disease_ even if it is noticed. From what they got from the brother, these are the last who spent any time with the girl."

The two men nodded at each other in satisfaction of a job well done, and made their way to their attached craft to head back and report their successful operation.


End file.
